Re: पंजाब के डाकघरों में 6 करोड 90 लाख रुपए की ठगी &

News Published in Daily Post on 9-9-2011

Fraudsters queer pitch in postal savings

RAJAY DEEP
Bathinda

The postal small savings schemes are designed to provide safe and attractive investment options to the public and at the same time it mobilises resources for development. But in Punjab fraudsters appear to have queered the pitch. It is learnt that these fraudsters are quite active in the state in looting innocent depositors, who save money by cutting and controlling their routine expenditures.

These depositors believe that the deposit in post offices is one of the safest options and have no hesitation in handing over their savings to either the post office employees or the authorised agents. According to information procured by an RTI activist Ranjiv Goyal of Rampura town under the RTI Act, as many as 105 cases of fraud involving an amount of Rs 6.70 crore in 12 postal divisions of Punjab came to the notice of the Postal department between August, 2005 and 2011.

In these cases, nearly 150 persons, either the postal employees or the authorised agents, were allegedly found involved but due to the “lax” attitude of the officials concerned and other lacunas in the procedure, hardly few of them were booked under criminal charges. The maximum cases of fraud came from Patiala division with the number touching 19. But the highest amount of fraudulent money was noticed in Ludhiana (M) division with a total of nearly Rs 4 lakh. Though the awareness level among the depositors in Chandigarh is said to be at the top, the miscreants did not even spare them. In Hoshiarpur division the postal officials and gramin sewaks cheated the people of Rs 1.13 crore in 17 cases.

The involvement of 10 persons has been found in Bathinda division against whom six cases of duping people of lakhs of rupees were in the official records of the postal department. The modus operandi of the accused is quite simple. The accused used to collect money from the depositors and entered the amount in their passbooks. But playing mischief, they kept on avoiding entering the amount into the official records of the post office concerned. All these frauds came to the notice of the department, when people visited the post offices to withdraw their savings and found that various entries were missing in the record there.

In most of the cases, not even the FIRs have been registered. Giving “shameless” replies some of the officers while providing information under the RTI Act mentioned that they were still deciding whether any police action was required. Officials of Patiala were quite bold in stating that they did maintain the record whether any action was taken against any of the 19 persons